The Backdrop CMS community wrapped up an exceptional year with three releases in 2026 following our steady four-month release cycle, and marking the project's 11th birthday along the way. This year brought a large set of changes in Backdrop's history, with major features aimed squarely at site builders and content editors.
Highlights for site builders include some new capabilities: selecting a single layout on multiple paths; grouping fields together with field groups; a UI for setting the responsive priority per Views table column; and providing URL history support for Views filters and pagers to easily link to Views with AJAX support.
Highlights for content editors include: selecting all items across all pages for Views bulk operations; uploading multiple files in a single file field; easy setting of anchors in text; and continuous CKEditor5 updates culminating in version 48.4.0 — plus many smaller refinements that make building and maintaining sites easier than ever.
As always, none of this would be possible without the global community of contributors behind every line of code, test, and translation. Thank you!
Here are some of the major features this year.
Backdrop 1.33 (release notes)
- Added support for PHP 8.5 #7008
- Update CKEditor5 to version 47.3.0 #7019
- Allow a layout to be selected on multiple paths. #1528
- Add option to select all items across all pages for Views bulk operations #3798
- Add option to disable comments entirely per content type. #3016
- List modules requiring updates to run on Status report #7010
-
Add an API and documentation for
_config_static cache()#7009
Backdrop 1.34 (release notes)
- Multiple file uploads #440
- Add an Icon browser (in Report dropdown) #7083
- Add options for URL history for AJAX views #7075
- Views table UI for setting responsive table class #3656
- Allow file entity fields to be inline on a form #6993
- Update CKEditor 5 to version 48.0.0 #7093
- Add jQuery 4.x as additional option #6404
- Allow to specify a layout template type #6808
- Drag icon improvements #7071
- Add hook to allow other modules to expose permissions on the node type form #7081
- Disable author and date by default on new content types #7080
Backdrop 1.35 (release notes)
- Added the Field group functionality to core #6865
- Lock the aspect ratio resizing images in the editor dialog #2054
- Add an Anchor Button to CKEditor #4914
- Provide an option to globally disable the personal contact forms, and make it the default for new installations #6067
- Allow the "Create exposed form block" setting for embed displays #7027
- Improve the accuracy of Time Ago calculations for longer time spans #7069
- Keep the original timestamp during the file classification part of an upgrade from Drupal 7 #7173
- Update CKEditor 5 to version 48.4.0 #7190
Thank you to our contributors
Backdrop CMS is built by a global community of volunteers and contributors. Every release is the result of collaboration among developers, testers, documentation writers, designers, translators, and site builders who donate their time and expertise to improve the project.
Thank you to everyone who contributed code, reviewed pull requests, tested fixes, reported issues, and helped prepare this release.